There exists today a wide variety of small, typically handheld, electronic appliances known generally as mobile internet devices, including in particular the vast array of products commonly known as mobile phones and tablets. In the current state of the art, all such devices are designed by their manufacturers to include a variety of hardware capabilities, such as cameras or positioning system receivers, selected by the manufacturer to address as many potential customers as possible. Similarly, manufacturers determine the form factor, that is, the size, shape, weight, color, and other physical attributes, of each product, with the goal to satisfy the greatest possible number of users with the fewest specific combinations. Finally, manufacturers configure the operating software of their devices to provide a variety of functions such that a particular function or related group of functions is performed in exactly the same way on as many device models as possible.
The practice of limiting the number of hardware and software combinations benefits the device manufacturers by reducing the complexity of the various systems and procedures they use for product development, manufacturing, sales, and customer support. The primary mechanism current manufacturers use for determining what, exactly, a particular new product should look like and do is a complex function in which the costs and benefits of their existing capabilities interact with the desires of customers. In general, however, the desires of end users are considered entirely in the aggregate, as presented by wholesale customers such as wireless carriers and major retailers, and occasionally as interpreted through observational research that categorizes people by seemingly sensible but ultimately arbitrary attributes.
Manufacturers recognize that individual end users and smaller groups of end users tend to have special needs for which the mass production processes described above cannot provide cost-effective point solutions. Therefore, current and emerging mobile devices provide a great deal of programmability through the provision of software applications, or “apps” as they are commonly called. These apps allow people to add a wide variety of software functionality to their mobile devices. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/126,49947 entitled “System for Creation and Distribution of Software Applications Usable on Multiple Mobile Device Platforms” and incorporated herein by reference, discloses a comprehensive system that enables the creation of such apps by a wide variety of people, including end users.
However, apps do not in general provide the ability to tune the base operating software of a particular class of mobile device. That is, for the functions provided in the operating software, the manufacturer generally constrains the look and feel, the functional interactions, and the basic behavior of the mobile device so that even with apps those functions are unchanged, except perhaps for minor preferences settings. For example, a mobile phone device that provides such common capabilities as an Address Book, Telephony Service, and Short Message Service will provide a specific presentation for these capabilities, as well as a specific way of interacting between them, according to the manufacturer's style and software development history. The operating software performing these functions will generally offer minor configurability options, such as whether to use text labels or graphic icons for identifying and selecting each function, but it generally does not offer any ability to make significant changes to how the capabilities and their associated functions interact with one another or with other apps.
Further, add-on software apps inherently cannot offer any ability to change the specific hardware built into a mobile device. While most mobile devices provide connectors and slots for adding or connecting hardware modules that provide optional capabilities, and coupled with software apps these hardware add-ons can be quite sophisticated, here too this practice is limited to adding modules that aren't in the base device. It cannot remove a built-in device that is not wanted.
Finally, neither add-on software apps nor plug-in hardware modules offer any ability to change the form factor of a device completely. End users with a variety of special needs, or with preferences that simply do not align with the mass market, are generally left unsatisfied by the available options.
What is needed, then, is a system whereby end users or others acting on behalf of a group of end users may create personal or custom configurations of mobile devices, and have them manufactured in lots as small as a single unit. Such a system would preferably also provide a distribution mechanism, so that others who may have similar needs can find and purchase existing custom configurations, or modify an existing one further.